Undoing Depression Quotes

“I realize now that no simple, single-factor theory of depression will ever work. Depression is partly in our genes, partly in our childhood experience, partly in our way of thinking, partly in our brains, partly in our ways of handling emotions. It affects our whole being.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“If you are treated like dirt long enough, you begin to fell like dirt”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“This is a little dirty secret of mental health economics: if you're depressed, you don't think you're worth the cost of treatment. You feel guilty enough about being unproductive and unreliable.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“We confuse depression, sadness, and grief. However, the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality — the ability to experience a full range of emotions, including happiness, excitement, sadness, and grief.2 Depression is not an emotion itself; it’s the loss of feelings, a big heavy blanket that insulates you from the world yet hurts at the same time. It’s not sadness or grief, it’s an illness.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“There's probably a basic fear there, that you're simply incompetent and inadequate, that you have to work so hard at life that you have no hope of happiness. One big secret I know from my patients is that everyone, no matter how successful or accomplished, has that kind of fear at times. Drag that fear out into the light of day and look at it with compassionate curiosity. No one who is able to read this book is completely incompetent or inadequate. You probably got that idea from some old, bad experiences, but they're not happening now. If you can face your fears about yourself, they lose all power over you.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“People feel ashamed of being depressed, they feel they should snap out of it, they feel weak and inadequate. Of course, these feelings are symptoms of the disease. Depression is a grave and life-threatening illness, much more common than we recognize. As far as the depressive being weak or inadequate, let me drop some names of famous depressives: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud. Terry Bradshaw, Drew Carey, Billy Joel, T. Boone Pickens, J. K. Rowling, Brooke Shields, Mike Wallace. Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Mark Twain.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Most experts agree that treatment with medication and psychotherapy combined is best, but very little research is being conducted on combined treatment because in the U.S. drug companies fund research, and they’re not interested in supporting that conclusion. So psychotherapy for depression became the exception, and a scrip from your GP became the norm.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Like alcoholism, depression is a lifelong condition that can be cured only by a deliberate effort to change our selves.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Depression becomes for us a set of habits, behaviors, thought processes, assumptions, and feelings that seems very much like our core self; you can’t give those up without something to replace them and without expecting some anxiety along the way. Recovery from depression is like recovery from heart disease or alcoholism.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Basics of Good Self-Care Exercise moderately but regularly Eat healthy but delicious meals Regularize your sleep cycle Practice good personal hygiene Don’t drink to excess or abuse drugs Spend some time every day in play Develop recreational outlets that encourage creativity Avoid unstructured time Limit exposure to mass media Distance yourself from destructive situations or people Practice mindfulness meditation, or a walk, or an intimate talk, every day Cultivate your sense of humor Allow yourself to feel pride in your accomplishments Listen to compliments and expressions of affection Avoid depressed self-absorption Build and use a support system Pay more attention to small pleasures and sensations Challenge yourself”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“3 Chris Peterson’s book, A Primer in Positive Psychology, is full of practical”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Chris Peterson’s book, A Primer in Positive Psychology, is full of practical”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“When my wife asks what I want for dinner, pasta or chicken, and I say I don’t care, what I’m often missing is that she’s asking for a little companionship, a little mutual ownership of a decision.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Some like the acronym ANTS for automatic negative thoughts, because like ants they seem to creep in from nowhere to spoil the picnic.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“motivation follows action instead of the other way around.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“(..) the family background that is so common among depressed men: a critical, distant, hostile father and a shallow, narcissistic mother. (..) Because children can’t see their parents objectively, they make the way their parents treat them part of themselves; if you are treated like dirt long enough, you begin to feel like dirt. Instead of understanding that Father is too critical, the child experiences himself as inadequate; instead of understanding that Mother is cold, the child experiences himself as unlovable. These feelings persist into adulthood as the basis for a characterological depression.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“we can reprogram our own brains through focused practice of any new skill, through attending to ourselves in a mindful, noncritical way.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“In our relationships with others, we have unrealistic expectations, are unable to communicate our own needs, misinterpret disagreement as rejection, and are anxious and unassertive in our presentation.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“People with depression, however, share a whole set of stories about the world that are highly distorted, and because their stories are self-fulfilling prophecies, they maintain and reinforce the depression.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Alcohol and other drugs may be used to give relief from the depression. But the relief is only temporary, at best, and usually the person just hates himself more for giving in to temptation. Alcohol itself is a depressant, and long-term alcohol abuse may lead to chronic depression”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Psychotherapy and medication both produce similar changes in brain functioning.18 There is a biochemical process in depression, but the individual has been made susceptible to depression through life experiences.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“On a human level, helping people understand that they have a disease can free them from much of the guilt and self-blame that accompanies depression. They can learn different ways of reacting to stress”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“They might medicate themselves with alcohol and drugs. Their families didn’t know how to help; neither sympathy nor moralizing seemed to have any effect. In this way, the depressed person gets caught up in a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“The real battle of depression is between parts of the self. Depressed people are pulled under by shadows, ghosts, pieces of themselves that they can’t integrate and can’t let go. The harder they work, the more they do what they know how to do, the worse things get. When their loved ones try to help in the usual ways, the commonsense ways that only seem natural expressions of caring and concern, they get rejected.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“and relationships in the here and now.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“There is clearly a biochemical component to depression, and medication can be helpful for many people, but medication alone is not sufficient treatment for most.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Science knows now that our brain does not simply store our experiences. Each experience changes the brain, structurally, electrically, chemically. The brain becomes the experience. If we are careful about the experiences we give our brains, we can change the brain itself.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You